Massive Radio Telescope Starts Observing the Skies

New submitter cyachallenge writes with this excerpt from New Scientist: "RadioAstron, effectively the largest radio telescope ever built, is up and running. The telescope's main component, a 10-metre radio dish aboard the spacecraft Spectr-R, launched in July to an oblong orbit that extends between 10,000 and more than 300,000 kilometres from Earth. By coordinating observations with radio telescopes on Earth in a technique called interferometry, the telescope can make observations as sharp as a single dish spanning the entire distance between the two farthest dishes. When Spectr-R is at its farthest from Earth, the system acts like one enormous telescope about 30 times as wide as our planet, boasting about 10,000 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope."

Comments

Re:Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong! Some incredibly amazing images have come from radio telescopes such as the VLA. You can find some of those pics on the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) Image Gallery website.

Re:Too bad

[somegeekynick]

Astronomy isn't exactly about pretty pictures, you know! But even then, you can make pretty pictures out of data from other bands of the EM spectrum, like the AC mentioned earlier.

Re:oblong??

[jbeaupre]

Forget "oblong", how about "massive"? Massive has to do with, well, mass. Seems that Aricebo might have the best claim for that (using the Earth itself as part of the structure).